I have recently completed my PhD at Bournemouth University on habitat suitability modelling in the New Forest National Park. The New Forest is a unique semi-natural landscape which contains many species and habitats which are rare and/or threatened. In order to effectively aid in the conservation of these species, particularly in the face of climate change, there is a requirement to know their habitat requirements and distributions within the New Forest. However, due to limited resources there are gaps in knowledge about this for many of these species. Habitat suitability modelling was carried out to suggest unsurveyed sites of potentially suitable habitat (and consequently higher likelihood of species occurrence) for selected species of high conservation concern using a range of approaches, namely Ecological Niche Factor Analysis (ENFA), Generalised Linear Models (GLMs) and Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) models. Evaluation of the models showed good to excellent performance. The application of BBNs to habitat suitability modelling was a relatively new approach but was found to be a promising one, particularly in being able to provide a quantitative assessment of the potential impact of climate change on the selected species.
I am currently working as an assistant researcher for a Defra-funded project at Bournemouth University. The project involves mapping and valuing the costs and benefits, in terms of biodiversity enhancement and ecosystem services, of alternative future scenarios for conservation; the increasingly popular integrated landscape-scale conservation, and the more traditional approach to conservation focussing on management in separate sites. In addition to providing a realistic appraisal of specific benefits, the results of the review may assist in identifying locations with particular potential for landscape-scale restoration initiatives.